Toward Resilient Vehicle Platooning: A Two-Layer Secure Control Architecture against Hybrid Cyber-Physical Threats

Jian Gong; Lei Ding; Chengfeng Jia; Yutian Liu; Jinde Cao

doi:10.1109/JAS.2026.125909

IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica

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Article Navigation > IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica > 2026 > In Press, Accepted Manuscript

J. Gong, L. Ding, C. Jia, Y. Liu, and J. Cao, “Toward resilient vehicle platooning: A two-layer secure control architecture against hybrid cyber-physical threats,” IEEE/CAA J. Autom. Sinica, early access, 2026. doi: 10.1109/JAS.2026.125909

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J. Gong, L. Ding, C. Jia, Y. Liu, and J. Cao, “Toward resilient vehicle platooning: A two-layer secure control architecture against hybrid cyber-physical threats,” IEEE/CAA J. Autom. Sinica, early access, 2026. doi: 10.1109/JAS.2026.125909

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Toward Resilient Vehicle Platooning: A Two-Layer Secure Control Architecture against Hybrid Cyber-Physical Threats

doi: 10.1109/JAS.2026.125909

Funds: This work was supported by the Natural Science Research Startup Foundation of Recruiting Talents of Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications (NY224054), the Basic Research Program of Jiangsu (BK20250038), and in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (62473203, 62573122, 62576098)

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Author Bio:
Jian Gong received the B.S. degree in automation from Ocean University of China in 2015, M.S. degree in control engineering from Dalian Maritime University in 2017, and Ph.D degree from the Intelligent Transportation System Research Center, Southeast University in 2024. From 2021 to 2022, he was a guest student in the department of Mechanical Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology. He is a Lecturer at the College of Automation and College of Artificial Intelligence at Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications. His research interests include connected and automated vehicles, cooperative intersection control, and multi-agent systems

Lei Ding (Senior Member, IEEE) received the B.Eng. degree in automation and the M.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees in control theory and control engineering from Dalian Maritime University in 2007, 2009, and 2014, respectively. From 2015 to 2016, he was a Visiting Research Fellow with Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW, Australia. From 2016 to 2017, he was a Postdoctoral Associate with Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA. From 2017 to 2019, he was a Research Fellow with the Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, VIC, Australia. He is currently a Full Professor at Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications. His research interests include cooperative control of networked systems, distributed optimization, and game theory. Prof. Ding was a recipient of the 2021 IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica Norbert Wiener Review Award, the 2020 IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics Outstanding Paper Award, and the 2019 IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC) Society Andrew P. Sage Best Transactions Paper Award (IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics). He has served as the Chair for IEEE IES Technical Committee on Network-Based Control Systems and Applications and the technical track co-chair for several international conferences. He is also an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics and IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica

Chengfeng Jia is currently a research fellow at the Centre for Advanced Robotics Technology Innovation, Nanyang Technological University. He received the Ph.D. degree from the School of Navigation, Wuhan University of Technology at 2024, and was a guest Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands, from 2021 to 2022. His research interests focus on Bayesian inference methods and their applications to the perception and control of unmanned surface and underwater vehicles

Yutian Liu received the B.S. degree in mechanics engineering from Harbin Institute of Technology in 2014. She obtained the Ph.D. degree in Urban Planning and Transportation group at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), the Netherlands, in 2024. She is currently a Postdoc in School of Urban Planning and Design, Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School. Her current research primarily revolves around the development of deep learning method and big data technology on transportation

Jinde Cao (Fellow, IEEE) received the B.S. degree in mathematics from Anhui Normal University in 1986, the M.S. degree from Yunnan University and the Ph.D. degree from Sichuan University, both in applied mathematics, 1989, and 1998, respectively. He was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Automation and Computer-Aided Engineering, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China from 2001 to 2002. Prof. Cao is an Endowed Chair Professor, the Dean of Science Department and the Director of the Research Center for Complex Systems and Network Sciences at Southeast University (SEU). He is also the Director of the National Center for Applied Mathematics at SEU-Jiangsu of China and the Director of the Jiangsu Provincial Key Laboratory of Networked Collective Intelligence of China. He is also Honorable Professor of Institute of Mathematics and Mathematical Modeling, Almaty, Kazakhstan. Prof. Cao was a recipient of the National Innovation Award of China, Obada Prize and the Highly Cited Researcher Award in Engineering, Computer Science, and Mathematics by Clarivate Analytics. He is elected as a member of Russian Academy of Sciences, a member of the Academia Europaea (Academy of Europe), a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, a member of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of African Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of Pakistan Academy of Sciences
Corresponding author: Lei Ding, e-mail: dinglei@njupt.edu.cn; Jinde Cao, e-mail: jdcao@seu.edu.cn
Received Date: 2025-08-23
Revised Date: 2025-12-15
Accepted Date: 2026-01-22

Available Online: 2026-03-13

Abstract

Abstract

This paper presents a hierarchical secure control framework for resilient vehicular platooning under hybrid cyber-physical threats, including coupled false data injection (FDI) and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, as well as actuator faults. A two-layer architecture is adopted to decouple cyber-layer disruptions from physical-layer execution, thereby enhancing system modularity and fault isolation. At the upper layer, a virtual platoon system is constructed, where a distributed resilient controller integrated with an event-triggered mechanism (ETM) is developed to ensure coordinated behavior while reducing communication overhead. At the lower layer, an adaptive fault-tolerant tracking controller is designed to compensate for actuator degradation and external disturbances, enabling each physical vehicle to follow its virtual reference independently. A layer-wise Lyapunov-based analysis is conducted to guarantee the practical exponential stability of the hierarchical control framework, where tractable LMI conditions are derived for both the cyber coordination and physical tracking components. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed architecture effectively mitigates fault propagation, maintains robust performance under concurrent cyber and physical threats, and outperforms non-hierarchical benchmarks in terms of system stability.
- Cyber-physical security,
- event-triggered mechanism,
- fault-tolerant control,
- hybrid cyber attacks,
- vehicle platooning

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References(34)

References

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Toward Resilient Vehicle Platooning: A Two-Layer Secure Control Architecture against Hybrid Cyber-Physical Threats

doi: 10.1109/JAS.2026.125909

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